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November 11, 2015

St. Louis Partner Brandon Neuschafer authored an article Nov. 10 in Refrigerated & Frozen Foods magazine concerning the FDA’s Preventive Controls Rules. Released on Sept. 10, the rules aim to shift the focus of U.S. food safety away from incident response and toward prevention. “FDA expects that many large facilities are already doing a vast majority of what is now being required,” Neuschafer wrote. “Those facilities may still need to develop additional documentation or tweak procedures. Interesting and complicated issues swirl around companies who are not themselves food facilities, but are technology and equipment providers to such facilities.” Click here to read his full article.

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July 9, 2015

This morning, FDA Deputy Commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine Michael Taylor announced that FDA is extending the compliance date for the menu labeling rules one year, making the new compliance date December 1, 2016. Since finalizing the menu labeling rules in December of 2014, FDA states that it “has had extensive dialogue with chain restaurants, covered grocery stores and other covered businesses, and answered numerous questions on how the rule can be implemented in specific situations.” Certainly, businesses impacted by the rule have been grappling with the substance and logistics of implementing the menu labeling rules, including working with suppliers to obtain additional information about products. This alone can be a tricky proposition for items like alcohol and craft beers, where nutritional information required by the menu labeling rules is not always readily available. The extension will allow all parties impacted by the menu labeling rules – a group

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May 26, 2015

Digest has been tracking the U.S. Country of Origin Labeling (“COOL”) rules that the WTO decided last year violate international fair trade rules. It was the third time the WTO found COOL to be unfairly discriminatory.

In response to the threat of retaliation by Canada and Mexico, last week, the House Agricultural Committee voted to repeal a portion of COOL. Under the bill, beef, pork, and chicken products will likely no longer state where the animals were born, slaughtered, and packaged. The USDA had previously tried to no avail to revamp the rules upon the WTO’s prior rulings.

The U.S. National Farmers Union’s President, Roger Johnson, has been vocal in his feelings against the move to repeal portions of COOL and stated: “The House Agriculture Committee has succumbed to lobbying and scare tactics from foreign governments and multinational meatpackers and inserted itself prematurely into the WTO process by voting for a bill

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May 12, 2015

One key element of the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act was the Act’s grant to FDA of powers to force a product recall. Prior to FSMA, FDA had no such authority, and was required to use other authorities to “lean” on companies to conduct a recall. Now, FDA may force a recall where it finds that there is a reasonable probability that food is adulterated or misbranded and the use of or exposure to the food will cause serious adverse health consequences or death to humans or animals. In addition to satisfying this fairly substantial threshold, the responsible party must refuse to voluntarily conduct a recall. The result is that FDA has initiated its mandatory recall authority only a couple of times, notably with respect to Kasel Associates Industries, Inc.’s pet treats and dietary supplements manufactured by USPLabs.

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February 22, 2015

On February 13, 2015, the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service approved the Arctic apple, a genetically modified strain of apple developed to resist browning. A Canadian company, Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc., first filed its petition for deregulation nearly three years ago. The technology works by “turning off” the production of a certain enzyme that is produced when an apple is cut or bruised. The Arctic apple is the one of the first deregulated genetically modified products designed to promote consumer-preferred traits, as opposed to traits like herbicide tolerance that promote certain production practices.

Notwithstanding APHIS’s approval, the question still remains of whether and how widely producers and consumers will adopt the technology in today’s environment surrounding GMOs. Because it will be at least five to seven years before Arctic apple trees can bear fruit that can be marketed, producers will be required to do some significant

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